Building Dean Van Halen
by CaffieneKitty
Summary: John recognizes Dean from a man he met in 1973. GEN. LJ Comment-fic.


**Warnings:** AU, over-wrought, spoilers for 4.03  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine  
**Summary:** For the LJ-Comm** spngenlove** comment-fic meme prompt from LJ user** faithintheboys** - _John recognizes Dean from a man he met in 1973._  
**A/N:** Contains lyrics from "Runnin' with the Devil", and is AU-ish because once John figured out Dean had time traveled, he went off on his own tangent.

-.-

**Building Dean Van Halen**  
by CaffieneKitty

-.-

_1978_

With what happened to Mary's folks just before he married her, a lot of the trivia of that week slipped his mind. One day in early December while Mary was home, wonderfully pregnant, John caught a song on the radio at the shop.

_I live my life like there's no tomorrow  
All I've got, I had to steal  
Least I don't need to beg or borrow  
Yes, I'm livin' at a pace that kills_

The name of the band was Van Halen. He'd heard the name before somewhere, but not as a band. John spent a quiet minute, listening to the music, tightening the alternator on a Buick, before the memory surfaced.

The tweaky guy in the leather jacket who'd steered him into buying the '67 Impala instead of the VW van, the one who asked some weird questions afterward, he had been named Van Halen. Funny coincidence. Music wasn't bad though.

John bought a copy of the album on the way home from work.

-.-

_1984_

Something was familiar about the coat. Couldn't say what, couldn't put a finger on it.

He didn't buy it for that half-wisp of memory, or because Dean had run into the rack of coats at the thrift store and peered out from underneath that one in particular, blinking owlishly. John bought it because it would last, it would work for most of the four seasons and the leather was thick enough to turn a knife blade or claws.

_Clothing that doubles as armor. Can't go wrong with that._ He packed it to the till in one arm, Sam in the other, Dean racing along behind.

-.-

_1991_

"I nearly bought a VW van, you know," John said, slurring a little from pain, exhaustion, and the only available anesthetic.

Bobby smirked at John, making sure his shoulder was just dislocated and not broken. "That so."

"Best thing I ever didn't do. Some guy, Van Halen, he told me I should get the Impala instead."

"Yeah?

"Yeah. I think..." Memory swam to the surface. "Bobby, I think he was a hunter. Thought he was nuts back then, he asked about cold spots and cattle mutilations and crap."

"Coulda been I guess. Hunting goes a long way back."

"You know any hunters from '73 by the name of Van Halen?"

"Not named Van Halen, no. Whoever he was, he didn't steer you wrong. A VW Van would have been rolling rust by now."

"'S a _great_ car." John stared into the distance. "Mary wanted me to get the van."

"Oh." Bobby pulled suddenly, sliding John's shoulder back into the socket.

John didn't shout, trying not to wake the sleeping boys upstairs, but he did shed a few tears.

-.-

_1995_

Dean was sixteen now, and managed to look about five in John's old leather coat. Part of that might have been his current mud-soaked state. Dean shivered and coughed at the edge of the pond, kicking away the last bit of tentacle still wrapped around his ankle.

"Son of a bitch," he muttered, clutching John's coat around his shoulders, over top of his sodden jean jacket.

John shivered in the cold night air, wet from the chest down himself, mad as hell that some overgrown freshwater squid had nearly taken his son from him.

"You've gotta _watch_, Dean! You've always got to watch!"

"I was watching!" Dean said, defensive tone weakened by shivers.

"You were watching _me_, watching my back. You weren't watching your own. On a two-man op, there are no extra eyes. You've got to watch out for yourself too."

"Yessir." Dean sounded even more lost than he looked.

John took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Yelling wouldn't help. Not the kind of sick-scared yelling John felt like doing. Dean was sixteen. John had been sixteen, going into the Marines. Sixteen felt different when you were inside it than when you were outside, looking at your boy who'd nearly been killed by a reject from '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'.

As John watched, Dean clenched his jaw, swallowed and visibly forced himself to stop shivering.

_He wants to be a hunter. God help me._

"Tell you what." John said, jerking his chin toward Dean. "You clean it, you keep it."

"What, the demon-octopus thing?" Dean squinted up at John, mud dripping down his nose.

"No, Dean. The coat."

Dean looked down at the bespattered coat around his shoulders. "But it's your coat."

John shrugged. "I've been thinking of getting a new one. Thing's nearly as old as your brother."

Dean grinned up at John, no longer shivering, teeth white against the dark mud. "Thanks, Dad!"

"Don't thank me. It's gonna be a bitch to clean." John stood up, knees creaking. "You done layin' around now? We've got some squid to fry."

-.-

_1998_

"Hey Dean," said John, knocking on the door of an elderly woman who'd lost her son three months ago, two months before local dogs had started disappearing, "why don't you take point on this one?"

Dean cleared his throat. "Really?"

"Yep. Talking to witnesses is a big part of hunting. Gotta start sometime, and you know what we need to know as well as I do. You'll learn more by doing than you will watching. You need practice."

The door opened, and John had some unexpected practice of his own in not breaking cover when Dean introduced himself as the lead singer of KISS, and John as the drummer that wore the cat makeup.

He'd have to talk to Dean again about picking fake names that weren't real people. Giving the names of rock stars as aliases was gonna catch up with him one day.

-.-

_2004_

John and Dean had been working separate gigs for the last two weeks and had arranged to meet in a parking garage in Flatbush to catch up on things, trade possible cases.

John was half an hour late after the stop at his Black Rock lock-up took longer than expected, but he knew Dean would still be there. He walked around the side of a cement column in the parking garage and step-stuttered to a halt.

Dean Van Halen was leaning on the hood of the Impala.

John eased behind the column. It was Dean. John's old coat. Dean's rock star naming habits. The car. Dean was the guy who'd told him to buy the Impala in 1973.

That was impossible.

The memory came back, clear as crystal. "My Dad taught me everything I know." The wistful smirk.

It wasn't possible. But there he was.

Nothing any hunter had encountered could time travel.

Nothing any hunter had encountered _yet._

The possibilities, the should-have-dones all flooded through John, boiling down to one. Saving Mary. If Dean had found some way to time travel, he could save Mary, and their whole nightmare of a life would be reversed, undone. Target practice replaced with baseball games. Sam going to Stanford and John being proud of him.

If he could time travel, at some point in the future, why hadn't Dean saved her? Why were they still living these lives?

John looked at Dean, comparing him to the man in his memory. The guy had been older than John had been. Older than Dean was now, but not by much.

Why hadn't he _saved_ her?

Whatever Dean had found that let him go back, he hadn't found it yet, but looking at him with the reflecting echo of the future-past-future in his head, John could only think of asking him that one question. He couldn't ask it. Dean would think he'd lost his mind.

John took a breath and let it go. _This is ridiculous. Memory plays tricks._ Dean looked sort of like the guy, and in John's memory, Dean's face had supplanted whatever he really looked like. Had to have. Time travel wasn't possible.

_It can't be possible, because if it is and Dean's found out how to do it, I wouldn't be here with a journal full of monsters and a truck full of guns. I'd be home, watching some dumb TV movie with Mary, running an auto shop with Dean and calling Sam at Stanford every week._

It's not him. It wasn't Dean back then.

But it was. John wanted nothing more than to go over and demand that Dean save Mary. Demand to know why he hadn't saved his own mother. Crazy or not, John couldn't do that to Dean.

He'd call. Leave a message on Dean's voice mail about the next case. Stay away for a while, 'til he got a grip. Until the need to shout cruel and unanswerable questions at Dean faded.

John backed around the cement column silently, leaving Dean at the Impala, went back to the truck and drove away. He was already in another state by the time the cellphone rang.

"Hey Dean."

"Dad? Where are you? Are you all right?"

_Why didn't you save your mother?_ "I- I'm fine, Dean. I got a hot lead, I had to take it."

"Okay. Where are you heading?"

He picked a state at random. "Idaho."

"You want me to meet you there?"

"No, no. I-" _Why didn't you save Mary?_ "I got it covered. Call Caleb, he's got a poltergeist in Montana, needs some back-up. Joshua had a line on something too."

"Oh. Did you want to reschedule the meet?"

John swallowed. It was too hard not to ask the question. "I'll be in touch, alright?"

The line went silent and for a second John thought the call had been dropped. "Yeah. Okay."

John ended the phone call.

Dean would have tried to save Mary. But he hadn't. Why?

Maybe Dean had tried to save her, and couldn't. Maybe he hadn't saved her because John hadn't given him the research and resources to do it. Maybe he'd gone back to the past without enough intel on what killed her and failed, or gotten killed himself.

John had to make sure that didn't happen. He'd been searching for Mary's killer since the day she died. He'd keep compiling research until the world turned back to how it should be. Safe and home and full of Mary, and no memory of this nightmare life.

John had to be sure that when Dean went to the past to save Mary, he was prepared for what was waiting there for Dean Van Halen.

Until then, John had to stay away. He had work to do.

- - -  
(That's it.)


End file.
